Posted
by
samzenpus
on Friday March 26, 2010 @04:28PM
from the now-that's-a-good-stink dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Beijing plans to install 100 deodorant guns at a landfill site on the edge of the city in the hopes that it will dampen complaints about the capital's rubbish crisis.The giant fragrance sprayers will be put in place by May at the Asuwei dump site. From the article: 'Municipal authorities say they will also apply more plastic layers to cover the site in response to furious protests by local residents who have to put up with the stench when the wind blows in their direction. The high-pressure guns, which can spray dozens of litres of fragrance per minute over a distance of up to 50m, are produced by several Chinese firms and based on German and Italian technology. They are already in use at several landfill sites, but they are merely a temporary fix.'"

I've never seen the logic in it. It's like when I've worked in offices with unisex bathrooms. Girls are all about spraying flowery stuff, turning the fan off, and closing the door. I've made the mistake of going in shortly after them, and all you smell is rancid shit and an overdose of perfume. I'd almost prefer just the smell of shit. Actually, I'd prefer the smell of nothing, but you can't fire someone for using the restroom, no matter how bad it smells.:)

Sure, blame it on the girls. I don't need to do that, I have the same experience at home. Every time I "drop the kids off at the pool." It smells terrible, so I spray the deodorant. Except then it smell like crap and flowers, which is 8 times worse*. You'd think I would figure this out and stop spraying the lilac lilly lavendar vanilla chemical mist, but I just can't help myself.

Think of it as smelling the world through rose scented glasses. It doesn't make sense to me either, because lighting a match works 100% better, but considering the strength of the pro-perfume arguments, you'd think they wanted to smell rosy sh!t.

I've actually noticed landfills with methane burners on them. On a daily basis, they cover the new trash with dirt, so the smell doesn't kill people for miles. They also install vented pipes (pipes with holes) so as things decay, the methane goes up, and is burnt about 12 feet above the ground. I suspect that handles any methane that works it's way through the soil too.

It seems like a better plan than spraying people down with giant perfume cannons and telling them it's rose

"Power from landfill methane exceeds solar power in New York and New Jersey, and landfill methane in those states and in Connecticut powers generators that produce a total of 169 megawatts of electricity — almost as much as a small conventional generating station. The methane also provides 16.7 million cubic feet of gas daily for heating and other direct us

The places I've seen it have been pretty remote, with no gas infrastructure anywhere near by. That's probably why I hadn't seen it. Not that I frequent landfills or anything, I'm just observant when I've been to them. It does make an awful lot more sense to harness it at least for something. The plumes I've seen on their burners have been pretty big, I'm sure it could have made some substantial energy.

I've worked at a Waste Management transfer facility (basically a temporary landfill) and the scent blasters smell a lot like simple green and they are reasonably effective, not 100% and definitely not like a the flowery air fresheners that exacerbate the problem.

You mention covering the layers with soil everyday, this is an extremely expensive process that shortens the life span of the facility and reduces the effectiveness. Landfills cost a lot of money to operate and remediate after their useful lifesp

Best way to overcome the smell of shit is to take a deep breath. Your olfactory senses are trained to filter it out. Just grit your teeth and take a big nose whiff, then exhale. No more poop. I don't understand what the problem is with people fearing their natural odors. If it smells that bad, you should probably look at your health, diet, etc..

Actually, I'd prefer the smell of nothing, but you can't fire someone for using the restroom, no matter how bad it smells.:)

I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but I believe you can fire someone for anything not explicitly forbidden by anti-discrimination and such laws. From what I understand, people in America are usually wrong when they assume that something can't legally be grounds for firing an employee.

Less than 4% of Beijing's rubbish is recycled – the UK recycles 35% – but is still near the bottom of the EU recycling league. Two per cent of Beijing's rubbish is burned but the rest is dumped in landfill sites, which cover an area of 333,000 sq m. Cities throughout the country face a similar problem.

Seems like they could make a serious dent in their landfill problems with just a little work.

Feeding trolls or not, there are probably some very technical, nerdy solutions to this problem which are way better than "big perfume guns".

There are, though I don't know if they'd qualify for nerdy. Like the "landfill engineer" says, "This ain't rocket surgery." The basics of running a landfill "properly" (as proper as the whole landfill thing can be, at least) were figured out decades ago, including steps to minimize the odor, of which, spraying the pile with hundreds of gallons of perfume isn't one. Of course, many of those steps cost money and require diligence on the part of the operators. So good luck to the downwinders.

This isn't even news. They're using a piss-poor solution for a problem that they created. That's not news, that's what 90% of the world does. What's the news part? That they're using perfume guns? Those aren't news-worthy. The basic tech is known as a fire hose. That Beijing has a trash problem? So do a lot of other places.

You imply the methane is stinky; on the contrary, methane is odorless. The only reason you can smell natural gas (from your stove and whatnot) is because the utility companies put odorants in it. (one of which naturally occurs human mouths, helping to cause halitosis)

It is possible to harvest methane for storage and later consumption as an energy source.

You can expedite (and deodorize) decomposition by turning it from anaerobic into aerobic by mechanically churning the mass. Unfortunately, that greatly comp

The high-pressure guns, which can spray dozens of litres of fragrance per minute over a distance of up to 50m

I'm just counting the days until department store cosmetics departments get this. In the arms race between perfume demonstration ladies and shoppers passing through the department, I think someone has just gone nuclear.

This matter we produce, stuffs us, we don't know what to do with it. Futurama of-course tackled this problem, all that is needed is a giant rocket to take every piece of garbage off this rock and dump it into the space. Later, when more garbage is created, all we do is throw the second pile at the first. One of them will fly into the Sun.

On the other hand it looks like soon enough there will be a huge opportunity for new ways of recycling this

Is it just me or is anybody else worried about what they'll end up putting in these sprayers? It doesn't help much if it's something loaded with CFCs or something. Also, is covered the thing in plastic a good idea? If they starve the landfill of air wouldn't everything decompose more slowly?

That is sorta the trouble with landfills in general. You typically stir a compost heap, that's what needs to be done in landfills if you actually want decomposition and it is done in some places but its hard to do well.

This is why you can go digging in landfill and find readable news papers from 40+ years ago. Once that stuff gets covered up by a few layers of anything such that air does not get to it, the rate at which it breaks down gets very slow.

Is it just me or is anybody else worried about what they'll end up putting in these sprayers?

With the insane [wikipedia.org] amount of pollution that China is already producing, you're worried about CFCs in the garbage deodorant?! "A drop in the ocean" doesn't even begin to capture your lack of perspective.

Wasn't there a company that built a $400 million trash factory that burned trash into a tiny, inert substance, generating enough energy in the process to generate income and pay for the factory? Whatever happened to them? I would think China would love to use their tech.

When I was a mechanic we used Brake Cleaner for all sorts of things. It left no residue, removed most nasty crud that needed to be removed and worked wonders removing moisture from electrical circuits. The problem was that it was pretty nasty smelling stuff. It completely evaporates leaving most of the chemicals floating around the shop for awhile.

Then one day I open a new case of the stuff and start using it on a brake job. Whoa! New smell! Apparently, the manufacturer thought it would b

This seems pretty appropriate for Chinese Society and Government at large. I have to wonder if logic enters into the decision making process at all.

Take for example when I was living in an Apartment in Beijing where we were having issues with a light fixture in one of my roommates room. After several weeks of prompting to repair guy to sort it out, he comes over at 7am, while I'm getting ready for work, enters the roommates room... Stands on his bed (with his dirty shoes on) WHILE my roommate is still sle

Spitting everywhere... When I was living in yangshuo, Guangxi region, there were propaganda posters everywhere that said "qing bie sui tu ditan" (please don't flippantly spit on the ground," advice was not follower.

...that trash is a mix of valuable resources, already digged out of the ground and preprocessed. You only have to filter what you want to take out, and recycle it. A good machine that can sort the pulverized stuff by mass and perhaps other chemical properties, might be able to recycle nearly all of that stuff. Biodegradables become mineral-rich earth. Glass is obviously useful. Metals even more so, and often very valuable. Plastics can also be recycled nowadays. I bet with all the electronics, that landfill

Rather than address the problems at the source - Reduce, Re-use, Recycle would be a start - the complaints and proposal is about covering up the problem at the end of the chain. This "cure" is if anything worse than the disease.

China's enthusiastically converted their country to one big foul toxic wasteland, but this is our shared fate, if such backwards responses to the problem are the best we can do.

Start with Use Less. Don't buy overpackaged goods or small packages. Re-use packaging and bags. Do recycle.

I can get a migraine attack if I am subjected to too much perfume, and there are a lot of other people with the same problem.

I (we) already have to avoid perfumed people at work, when travelling and standing in line for something. Now, all of us with the same sensitivity are being locked out of that chinese neighbourhood completely.

Why oh why don't these countries use incinerators? Incinerators can generate energy out of garbage, and pollution is no longer an issue with modern filters. The metal bits - even nonmagnetic metals like copper and aluminum - can be easily recovered out of the ash and recycled. The remaining ash takes up a fraction of the landfill space otherwise required, and doesn't stink.
Landfills are primitive and wasteful.